Talk:Magnetic pulse welding

"... thanks to the jet ..."

What jet? 216.174.103.45 (talk) 12:26, 15 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Removing Advantages of MPW - Green process section...

This was originally going to be a dubious tag, then I went to one of the references (which I'm also deleting because it doesn't back up the paragraph it's attached to at all and is the website of a manufacturer of magnetic welding equipment extolling its virtues) and realized the list was copied and changed slightly from the same page so the whole section is a potential COPYVIO. If it was something other than a list and had meaningfully educational information in it I'd try to find another source, but I'm not going to go find references for every barebones item on some company's ad for them. I'm leaving the original stuff I was writing about one of the items below:

One of the advantages is listed as:

"Green process: no smoke, no radiation and no extraction equipment required."

This badly needs a citation and sounds like BS for several reasons:

Electromagnetic pulse generation like this needs lots of power. The article mentions 500 kA of current per weld and 15kHz frequency with no mention of voltage so there's not an easy way to calculate power consumption (per weld or continuous), but even if they're using an imaginary 100% efficient high frequency transformer and 1V, that's a half megawatt per weld. Since one of the other advantages listed is speed, we can safely assume this system is meant to be discharged as fast as the capacitors recharge which means a continuous 1/2MW power draw.
There might be no smoke at the manufacturing site, but if the power plant generating their power is coal-based there's a ton of smoke somewhere else. If it's nuclear not so much. If it's somehow all solar / wind / hydro, good for them. In that last case I'll just go ahead and pretend that building all of those facilities is done using imported magical gnome labor that conjures parts from the void now so there aren't any emissions involved in building them, mining the raw materials, or from workers getting to and from the construction sites (and judging by the wind farms around here, pretty much every day forever to fix a turbine or two).
There might be no radiation (except the credit card wiping, phone frying, electronics ruining electromagnetic pulses, so there actually is quite a lot of radiation, but we'll assume they meant atomic) at the manufacturing site (until they run the part through a horrifyingly dangerous gamma emitter one room over to check for flaws in the metal if it's something that can never have any, like the pressure vessel pictured), there's still a ton of it being dumped somewhere else if their power is coal based, you're breathing most of it. There's probably around 1/16th of a coffee can full of waste a year if their source is nuclear. You wouldn't want to be in the same room as an actual coffee can containing it, but luckily it's sitting at the bottom of a deep pool until it isn't generating too much heat to do something else with. I don't have any figures on whether or not uranium / other radioactive mineral deposits regularly occur alongside the rare metals needed for solar panels, or in copper / lithium / iron / titanium / etc mining, but people "grew up" with natural uranium and it's fairly harmless to us so I'll give them that one for the whole supply chain to be nice.
Ok, so there's no extraction equipment required... I'm guessing in traditional welding on assembly lines, "medium strength fan" and the equipment to clean the air being sucked out of the room to the point where it's safe to output is down there with "toilet paper" on the company yearly expense report; it also has absolutely nothing to do with being "green" and likely needs to be in its own room on the assembly line surrounded by a faraday cage to prevent the regular pulses from cooking half the factory anyway.

There were other problems with the list which make more sense since it turned out to be snuck in from an ad, but I found that one the most amusing.

Now off to edit the page. :P A Shortfall Of Gravitas (talk) 18:45, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]